How Ralph Breaks the Internet Brings the Internet to Life

We’re getting closer and closer to the big day. Carrigan and I are counting down to the day we get to finally go see Ralph Breaks the Internet! We’re huge Wreck It Ralph fans and have plans to see the new movie on opening day!

Ralph Breaks the Internet hits theaters on November 21, 2018 so mark your calendars! To get you ready, I’ve got a ton of really cool facts from my behind the scenes visit to Disney Animation Studios this summer!

Huge thanks to Disney for providing me with the press trip experience in exchange for my coverage.

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RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET BRINGS THE INTERNET TO LIFE

So how does one actually site down and decide what the Internet would look like if it was an actual place we could visit?

For Disney animators, it came down to three different areas:

Creating and refining the story that will be told in Ralph Breaks the Internet aka STORY DOWNLOAD

Creating the world of the Internet aka THE WEB’S WIDE WORLD

Developing the people that live and use the Internet aka POPULATING THE INTERNET

For our panel on how the story in the movie came to live, we got to meet three members of the Ralph Breaks Internet story team:

Josie Trinidad, head of story – started 2004 and has worked on films like Princess & Frog, Tangled, Wreck It Ralph, and Zootopia.

Jason Hand – joined Disney in 2005 and has worked on the Princess & Frog, Big Hero, Zootopia, and Moana.

Natalie Nourigat – began working at Disney in 2015.

The team works very closely with directors to visualize the script in a simple way.

The process starts with the director’s idea then goes to research where they gather inspiration and references. Then it’s brought to the story department where writers, the head of story and directors work together.

As the story starts to take shape more discussions happen, they make changes, and they repeat again and again until the basic idea is agreed upon. That’s when the story finally goes to script writing!

After that, there’s a long storyboarding process that involves ideas, screenings revisions, changes, and eventually we end up with the amazing story we’ll all get to enjoy in Ralph Breaks the Internet!

FUN FACTS ABOUT STORY DEVELOPMENT FOR RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET

15 story artists

10 screenings

45 total sequences

153 total sequences boarded

7,883 total sequence versions

283,839 total storyboards drawn on this project

2. DEVELOPING THE WEB’S WIDE WORLD

Once the story is in place, there was another huge task to take on — bring the world of the Internet to life in a way that Ralph and Vanellope could explore.

The directors and producers asked, “How can we make the world feel like the world of the Internet we explore everyday?”

The team brought them cat videos when they were asked to bring in ideas.

More and more cat videos.

The Internet is exclusively made up of cat videos, right?

We met with part of the team who handled the huge task of creating the environment that is so important in the movie.

Figuring out how to depict the expanse of the Internet was the main task the team had to handle for this movie.

They visited One Wilshire Blvd which is a building that houses the connections for all connections, miles of miles of wires and tens of thousands of servers that connect the west coast of America to the Internet.

It’s what inspired what the world of the Internet might look like in the film.

The Internet world could be similar to a busy metropolitan city – with districts.

Check out some of the different worlds they had to develop for Ralph Breaks the Internet:

Original worlds from Wreck It Ralph like the arcade, the games, and other real world locations.

New worlds for the second movie like the Internet itself and all of the places Ralph and Vanellope visit

KNOWSMORE (the searchbar)

BuzzzTube

eBay

Amazon (was inspired by boxes)

Snapchat

YouTube

Facebook

Twitter (look for the birds)

Google

OH MY DISNEY (pay attention to how it resembles Disney as a destination with a futuristic castle but also some motel sites nearby!)

Once they settled on style they knew they had to populate hundreds of them to create the world. It didn’t work at first so they had to find new creative ways to handle it.

Their solution was to design pieces that could be reused across buildings as populating the “city” so you can see buildings and signs/billboards as far as the eye can see! It’s pretty amazing!

Each website has several layers of sidewalks, paths, 45-degree angles like you see on a motherboard, and holograms. There will be so much to take in that you might have to see this movie more than once!

FUN FACTS ABOUT DEVELOPING THE WORLD OF THE INTERNET

150 master sets

5,736 unique assets

there are 100,000 elements in the shot where Ralph and Vanellope stand looking over Internet standing on the balcony! That only includes buildings, signs, etc. It doesn’t even include all the characters that had to be populated!

1.9 million render hours/day (computer hours)

3. POPULATING THE INTERNET

Once they had the world of the Internet, they needed more than Ralph and Vanellope in the world, right? It wouldn’t be a very exciting movie without some other characters to interact with.

In Ralph Breaks the Internet there are two types of characters:

Users – avatars of real-life people as that person explores the Internet

Netizens – full-time citizens of the Internet. They work at the websites and help the users.

We met with some of the animation team to learn more about how these characters came to life and what went into creating them!

They thought about what all the foot traffic looks like on NYC sidewalk for inspiration. But since the world of the Internet in the movie is three dimensional, they also had to look up and down too. There’s foot traffic everywhere!

Moe ran a crowd simulation on an early environment and it came back with 150,000 characters!! 150,000 characters!

For comparison purposes here are the character counts for some other familiar Disney movies:

Wreck It Ralph 2 – 434 characters, 6,752 variants (plus color swings which are different textures on shirts, skin color, hair color, etc.) for a total of 500,000+ character options!

So what about the specific details that went into each kind of character for the movie?

RALPH & VANELLOPE

The technology has grown since Wreck It Ralph so the original characters were updated.

They could deal with issues they ran into during first film (like bending Ralph’s leg, getting a good elbow angle), so characters got enhanced. They’re the same characters just enriched and more detailed!

The Net Users are very simplified versions of you and me. They have different dress up options but the bodies are identical and unisex.

They created a list of options to create different versions — came up with rules for them so it was easier to create so many. They did this with the Netizens too.

How will they move? React to things? When you move your mouse, how does that affect movement?

All the net users do are very specific things that we’re doing when online. So they have very direct movement.

Animators decided on very simplistic expressions too. If you send a thumbs up, they just have a simple smile. They have a limited range of emotions. They represent that moment in time when we express a single feeling on the Internet.

The Netizens are the full-time citizens of the Internet. They make things happen on the Internet.

When you send an email one will deliver it in a post office truck. If you shop online one is pushing your cart.

These are some of my favorite characters so watch for them!

There are also two very specialized Netizens that you’ll see a lot of in the movie — YESSS and KNOWSMORE.

Yesss is the curator of cool. She’s the most up to date about what’s hot on the internet. KNOWSMORE is a little bit older search engine (think AskJeeves). He’s designed to be an advertising mascot as well as the character so he is his logo. I love that he has a 60s advertising feel to him!

Watch for both of these characters, I think you’ll love both of them!

THE INTERNET IS CROWDED

We all know there are tons of people on the Internet each day. So how is that represented in the movie?

The animation Crowd Department takes hand-animated stuff then adds extra hand animated hand-animated variants to the crowds. The even blend animations to create more variations!

So when you see a large group of Net Users in the movie, watch for some of these variants:

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About Mariah

Mariah is a former teacher and mother of two amazing kids who keep her on her toes! She's a busy WAHM who is always looking for ways to make parenting a bit easier while still making amazing memories! Read more about Mariah!

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